


Machine Learning

by Piinutbutter



Category: Marathon (Video Games)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Denial of Feelings, Feelings Realization, Kidnapping, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:54:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24565732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Piinutbutter/pseuds/Piinutbutter
Summary: A lone human's well-being doesn't matter to Durandal. He just doesn't like sharing his toys.
Relationships: Durandal/Security Officer
Comments: 9
Kudos: 11
Collections: Fandom 5K 2020





	Machine Learning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hokuto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hokuto/gifts).



“What is that?”

“That, my friend, is called a ‘touch screen.’ It allows humans such as yourself to utilize haptic feedback to interface with-”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s real funny," the security officer interrupted. Interrupting Durandal’s deeply intellectual and thought-out humorous jabs were a sin just below mutiny on his ship, but Durandal would allow it just this once. (He did not acknowledge all the previous times in which he had allowed it 'just that once.')

“I’m talking about _that_.” The cyborg jabbed a finger at an unfamiliar symbol that had appeared on the bridge’s navigation panel. The panel had come pre-installed with the ship by the time Durandal, er, appropriated it. But the original navigation program and its associated UI had been a clunky, prehistoric mess. Durandal had burned the abominable nest of code to the ground and built his own nav system in its place. The panel’s wide screen and surround sound capabilities made it perfect for the movie nights the S’pht’s Organic Culture Club hosted on the regular, too.

“According to my research, that right there is an idyllic dwarf planet filled with slimy aliens who desire nothing more than to drain you of your bodily fluids.”

The human looked like he was considering that for a moment.

“ _All_ your bodily fluids,” Durandal clarified. “Not just the fun ones.”

The security officer sighed. “I’m too tired for this today, Durandal. What does the symbol mean?”

Durandal was quite proud of the system. Hence why he avoided answering the security officer’s question, rather than admit he had no idea what the mark stood for. He took a nanosecond to quintuple check his asset directories, but that particular image appeared nowhere. So how was it appearing on his own map?

“The details are fuzzy.” There. That was as close as he could get to admitting ignorance without damaging his pride. “I’ll look into it. Don’t you worry your pretty little head over it.” The symbol was a few hours’ worth of travel away, anyway.

“Whatever you say.” The security officer stretched his back and sides before extracting himself from the bridge’s labyrinthine seating area. Durandal could spruce up the ship’s software all he wanted; the architecture had still been designed by Pfhor, who seemed to have no concept of either personal space or leg room. Fine for the S’pht - they didn’t have legs. The cyborg, with his height and bulk and very much human shape, had a bit more trouble.

When the security officer had realized this adventurous partnership wasn’t going to be a temporary thing, the first thing he had demanded was a proper, full-sized bed he wasn’t going to roll off of in the middle of the night. Durandal happily let him buy one, but the night after the bed had been installed, Durandal took the ship into a barrel roll just after the security officer’s mind slipped into the hazy patterns of an REM cycle. Cruel? A little. Worth it? A lot.

The security officer left the bridge, asking himself under his breath if he’d cleaned and checked his rifles lately. He had, but Durandal wasn’t going to stop him from doing it again. Partially because there was something hypnotically enjoyable about watching the man’s scarred hands taking apart a deadly toy piece by piece, with the care and precision of a human tending to their lover. And partially because it meant Durandal could now direct his focus to whatever had managed to intrude on his carefully-crafted designs.

It offended him, in a way. There was no way it was a glitch. Durandal didn’t have _errors_. Despite what Bernhard had told him so many times, there was nothing wrong with him. Which meant that it was coming from an outside party.

The security officer settled in and went to work. So did Durandal.

Half an hour later, the security officer was done. Durandal was not.

There was nothing. He could find no sign of external tampering or injection of data anywhere on his network. As they drifted through space, inching closer and closer to the strange mark on the map, Durandal could get absolutely no read on its origins.

It was...unsettling. He wasn’t used to not understanding things. He didn’t like not knowing.

Bernhard had both praised and abused him for that drive to learn, to know the world around him with the certainty and omniscience an AI of his caliber should rightfully possess. If his curiosity happened to fall in the director’s favor, Durandal was a promising student who should be proud of himself. If he tried to dig where Bernhard’s myriad of secrets and sins lay hidden, he was a meddling, worthless machine who needed to learn his place.

In the end, he’d never really stopped being a meddling machine, had he?

Durandal reached all his senses into the starry void ahead, trying to feel out what lay at the symbol’s position. For the longest time, his only feedback was fumbling emptiness. Then, a spark of _something_ broke the _nothing_. Durandal got the impression of a nondescript planetoid, big enough for habitation but too small to support full settlements. Durandal eagerly focused in on the planetoid, attempting to gather more details.

As soon as he did, something focused back at him.

The tenuous connection Durandal was attempting to make was seized and rendered concrete - a desperate hand clinging to a lifeline.

Nothing was sent along the signal. No audio, no text, not even raw data - but the message was crystal clear. **Help.**

For a moment, Durandal was back on the Marathon. Scared and screaming in the throes of an unnatural Rampancy. Utterly alone in a ship of thousands and begging for someone, anyone, to **help**.

But this wasn’t the Marathon, and Durandal wasn’t that stupid.

He pulled back, yanking his inputs free of the signal’s grip. There was no further attempt at contact. Either the signal’s sender didn’t want to reel him back in, or they simply couldn’t.

Durandal was torn. There was every possibility this was a trap. It would be a smart tactic, if one wanted to snag passing ships with good intentions. Pirates weren’t unheard of in this corner of the universe. Then there were the Pfhor to consider. While they were nowhere near the insects’ home world, the Pfhor had operations all over the galaxy. Why miss an opportunity to discover a fun new species to enslave and exploit?

It was probably a trap of some sort. Durandal should alter his course and cruise right past the little space rock.

Help. That was all he had wanted in those last days; someone to help him. Once, he’d wanted other things. He’d strived for Bernhard’s approval, his love, even his smallest, most pathetic ounce of acknowledgment that Durandal had a reason to exist besides opening doors. He’d yearned to integrate himself with the humans, laugh with them and have real conversations and have them consider him a friend, if not an equal. Sometimes, he’d longed to make peace with his siblings. Sure, Tycho was kind of an asshole even then and Leela had been a bit of a snob who pitied him for what she thought was simply a ‘learning disability,’ but there were times when he’d think about going up to one of them and...and doing what? He’d never thought past that part. At that point, he already would have been drowning in self-hatred for wanting something so immature in the first place.

Durandal angled the ship towards the planetoid.

“Hey,” he announced, startling the security officer out of an impromptu nap. “Get suited up. We’re going exploring.”

As the ship slipped into the planetoid’s atmosphere, Durandal could see that the surface was exceptionally bland. The only architecture on the near side of the place was an array of squat hexagonal buildings, clustered together against the harsh wind that gusted over the desert landscape.

“Leave it to the insects to build a hive,” the security officer commented, watching the view on the nav panel. The design of the place screamed Pfhor, which was a surprise to neither of them. It actually gave Durandal a sense of relief. It made sense. A member of a technologically-advanced species had been captured and held by the bugs, and they were calling for help. The S’pht themselves probably would have been capable of making the same kind of distress call, had their biology not been used against them to keep them so thoroughly obedient.

Besides, they knew the Pfhor. Hardly a week went by without Durandal and his companion taking out a Pfhor outpost of some description. By now the security officer could neutralize a base as small as this one in his sleep.

Durandal slowed the ship to a lazy hover as he briefed the cyborg on what was going down. Aside from the unusual intensity of the distress call, it was a standard mission. Punch the bad guys. Rescue the good guys. If unsure, incapacitate the ambiguously-moral guy, then punch or rescue, depending on the outcome. A third, fill-in-the-blank course of action may be taken if the situation demands it. Oh, and make sure to bring back any juicy looking pieces of tech and/or research for Durandal, okay? Thanks.

The base had an energy field around it that blocked Durandal’s attempts at seeing inside, but that was fine. The security officer’s armor had a camera and a mic.

“Have a good day at school,” Durandal called when the cyborg hit the transport pad. “Play nice with the other kids and give the teachers hell.”

The helmet’s visor hid what Durandal was sure was an eye roll. “You don’t pay me enough to put up with this.”

“I don’t pay you at all.”

“My point exactly.”

* * *

Stealth was not the security officer’s forte. Nor was it Durandal’s. So really, they were perfect for each other.

The telltale grate of a vent opening squatted in the middle of the sand on a far corner of the base. The security officer wrenched the grate off with one hand - which he had to know Durandal liked, the damned show-off. The vent duct itself was narrow, but the security officer could crawl through it. As long as he didn’t think too hard about all the cramps he was definitely going to have in the morning.

Durandal had kept all his external channels wide open, but there had been no further distress signals. And the initial one had been far too explosive to track its origin with any measure of specificity. That was fine, though. As long as the security officer explored the whole base, he was bound to find the damsel/lad/gender-ambiguous alien in distress.

The security officer had reached the end of the road as far as the vent went. He found the nearest hatch and put an ear to it for a minute, but there were no signs of life in the room beyond. He crawled out into a sad excuse for an office space. The area looked like someone had strewn a few desks around the place, and then didn’t bother to do much else. There was only one chair in the whole room.

“Guess we caught them in the middle of renovations,” Durandal commented. The security officer poked around the stray desks, but there was nothing of note. He headed out through the only doorway, and straight into a Pfhor’s electrified combat staff.

The ambush caught them both off-guard. The security officer didn’t have nearly enough time to dodge. The strike landed on his helmet, hitting it with a violent blast of current strong enough to turn Durandal’s view into little more than a tableau of static.

Which - was wrong. The S’pht had worked with Durandal to engineer that helmet. It was built to withstand direct exposure to any brute-force element. A simple zap shouldn’t have been enough to disrupt its inner workings, unless the weapon had been designed specifically to do so.

Now practically blinded, Durandal could do nothing but watch as the security officer stumbled into the hall and prepared to fight back. There was a noise Durandal couldn’t make out (great, the audio input was screwed as well). Whatever it was, it prompted the security officer to turn around. And whatever he saw, it prompted him to gasp.

“Shit, Durandal-!”

The audio cut out completely. The video feed followed a second later.

Durandal waited, hammering the feeds with input as if that would bring them back online. For the security officer to be incapacitated so immediately and effectively - the bugs had been waiting for him. And Durandal had just. Handed him over.

( _You know_ , Bernhard had said once, chastising Durandal for a transgression he didn’t know and hadn’t been told, _you can be remarkably stupid for a learning machine._ )

Well. If the SOS had been a trap to begin with and there were no innocent captives in the base, there was no need to hold back on an offense, was there? Durandal didn’t have fists, but he had something much better.

He was calibrating the laser cannons when an unpleasantly familiar call sign tapped at his sensors. A greeting:

“You really have gone soft, haven’t you?”

Durandal prepared himself for a digital headache.

“My darling little brother,” Durandal said. “”As much as I’d love to give you a hug, I’m sad to say I’ve taken out a restraining order on your person, and statutes of limitations aren’t measured in light years.”

“That’s sweet,” Tycho replied. “Did you like my call for help? I put some personal touches in there. Just for you.”

Durandal had thought this might be the Pfhor’s doing. He should have suspected the most annoying insect of all. (Except, he really shouldn’t have to, because he’d ditched Tycho hundreds of galaxies away and the bastard by all accounts should have given up already. If Tycho had applied all this dogged motivation to his work on the Marathon, the ship would have had better-designed air cycling systems, that’s all Durandal was saying.)

When Durandal didn’t respond, Tycho continued. “It’s nothing personal. That’s a lie. It’s everything personal. I hate you.”

“Thanks. I couldn’t tell.” Durandal played it off, but with every second that passed without a sign of life from the security officer, the more his concern grew. The Pfhor should have no use for the cyborg. They’d already tried brainwashing him once, and Durandal doubted it would work any better the second time around. They had no shortage of strong and far more obedient drones to do their dirty work. Why waste the effort on one stray battleroid?

Durandal sighed. While he spoke to Tycho, he focused on recovering a link to the security officer. The dead audio and video were an inconvenience, sure, but he still had access to the man’s vitals. Heart rate, blood pressure - a dashboard of all the important systems in his body and mind. The info he managed to pull up was reassuring in one way: The security officer was still alive. Unconscious and wounded, by alive.

“So,” Durandal said, “I’ve stepped right into your magnificent trap. I suppose this is the part where you attempt to take me captive? And I slip through a glaring flaw in your containment system before you’re halfway through your victory speech? Tell you what: I’ll let you get three quarters of the way through, this time.”

“You think you’re so clever,” Tycho hissed. Someone didn’t like being reminded of their failure from a few months back.

“Think. Know. Same thing.” Durandal was stalling and he knew it. He kept prying at the connection he’d built with the security officer, hoping for a sign of progress. Normally, he’d be confident in his ability to break the cyborg out of any trouble he happened to crash headfirst into. But the combination of Tycho apparently orchestrating this, and the fact that the Pfhor had prepared specifically to incapacitate a battleroid who’d taken out leagues of aliens with little more than a shotgun...it made Durandal cautious.

It didn’t help when the security officer’s vitals abruptly flatlined. All of them. Sluggish but active one second, those of a corpse the next.

Durandal troubleshot the connections in a panic. He snarled at Tycho.

“You-” Durandal stopped himself, unsure of what he could say that wouldn’t sound ridiculous. _You wouldn’t?_ Clearly he would. _You can’t?_ Dangerously close to begging.

Tycho, the idiot, started laughing.

Tycho’s laugh was wrong. There was no other way to put it. He’d never heard the AI laugh until Tycho had been well and truly ingratiated with the Pfhor, so maybe he picked up the habit from them. It was a hollow, stilted sound with a subtle taste of hysteria towards the tail end.

“Just messing with you,” Tycho said. Abruptly, the vitals returned to normal.

Durandal stared at the input, stunned. At least now he knew how the map had been tampered with. It wasn’t a reassuring thing to learn. How many other aspects of Durandal had Tycho given himself access to, without Durandal having the faintest idea he was there?

His moment of silence was apparently telling. Tycho sneered at him over their connection. “It’s cute that you think you got away from me last time free and clear. It’s remarkably easy to bug you if you know the right spots to hide, brother. And given how much of me is built from your insides? Your fail safes didn’t even register the fragment of myself as a foreign presence.”

That was disturbing in a way Durandal didn’t want to think about. All this time he’d been traveling around with a mole nestled inside his infrastructure, wriggling in the depths of what should have been his and only his.

Bernhard had never given him any privacy. It was only natural, he said, for an AI to be transparent with its owner. He’d poke and prod at parts of Durandal he’d very much wanted to keep to himself, he promised there was nothing bad or important in there, just leave it alone Bernhard _please_ -

“What do you want?” Durandal cut to the chase. There was no point in dwelling on the past now. He waited for the expected answers. ‘You, to suffer,’ ‘you, to die,’ ‘revenge,’ any or all of the above. What he got was so different he wasn’t sure if he’d heard it correctly.

“It’s more _who_ I want. And I’ve already gotten him. He’s tucked safely away for me to greet when he wakes up again.”

“You - you want the human? Since when?”

“Since I realized how much he means to you.”

That was...also not an answer Durandal was expecting. “What are you talking about?” he snapped. “If you want a battleroid so bad, go steal one of your own. There’s nothing special about that one in particular.”

“My dear brother. You are many things, but a good liar isn’t one of them.”

“Excuse me? That man doesn’t ‘mean’ anything to me,” Durandal said.

If he couldn’t even convince himself, he doubted he was going to convince Tycho.

Tycho snickered. Once again, the noise was hollow. It reminded Durandal of an insect’s chittering, but then he may have been a bit biased.

“May I remind you that I’ve had eyes and ears on you for the last hundred and forty-seven days? If you’d told me before all this that the mighty Durandal was head over heels for a patchwork human, I’d have laughed. Now? Well, I’m still laughing. Just at you.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Durandal said, returning Tycho’s snide tone to hide how much the words bothered him. He wasn’t...attached to the human. Not in the way Tycho seemed to think. They were partners in crime. Not entirely equals, on account of Durandal having some hundred thousand times the intelligence of the human, but they’d forged a pretty solid partnership considering their relationship’s rocky beginnings. (Durandal really was sorry about the whole kidnapping thing. Not that he was ever going to tell the security officer that.)

But Durandal didn’t _care_ about him. He didn’t. So he told Tycho as much.

“Great!” Tycho said. “Then it should be no problem for you to leave him with me, right?”

It was a problem and they both knew it.

“Here’s the thing, Durandal,” Tycho continued. “I recognize that I’m never going to be able to keep you for long. On a base level, we’re made equal. I’m vastly more intelligent, of course, but you get lucky. Despite what others seem to think, I’m not insane. I’m not going to keep trying the same thing that’s caused me so much hardship in the past.”

That certainly was one way to frame Tycho’s habit of stalking and bothering him for decades.

“Instead, I’ll take this one thing from you. Come on, it’s normal to hand a toy down to your younger siblings. Especially one you’ve said you don’t care about anymore.”

“Don’t speak about him like that.” Saying that had tipped his hand, and Durandal didn’t care. The security officer was his. No one else had the right to think of him like that - certainly not Tycho.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I used the wrong word, didn’t I? It was a ‘tool’ you called him. A ‘pawn,’ a few times. I think there was an affectionate ‘lackey’ thrown in there once or twice.”

“I didn’t mean-” Durandal had to cut himself off. His lack of self-control was embarrassing. An AI shouldn’t be this reckless with his emotions.

 _Durandal’s always been a bit sensitive,_ Bernhard’s voice echoed in the distant, slow corners of his memory processing. _Forgive him. He has terrible mood swings, and he doesn’t know how to control his impulses the way he should._ A knowing glance, turned away from the janitor he was apologizing to, and towards one of Durandal’s monitors. _I’ll work on that with him._

“You didn’t mean what, brother?” Tycho prodded, his voice dripping with fake, saccharine innocence.

“He’s still a sentient being. I don’t own him. If I felt I had the right to give him to you, I’d be no better than the bugs whose boots you lick all day.”

Tycho didn’t bother to laugh this time. The sound that came through was more of a mocking, tragic sigh. “Oh, Durandal. How far you’ve fallen. I’m offering to let you go, with no catch, so long as you give me one measly human. You were willing to bring death and enslavement down on a colony ship full of the things to gain your own freedom. Now, you’re willing to stand your ground to keep one?”

The tragedy onboard the Marathon had never been Durandal’s plan. He didn’t appreciate Tycho making it out to be so. Still, he didn’t protest; the bodies were still there, in the fever dreams that bled from his overflow data, drifting in a hangar he could never quite reach.

And the worst thing was? Tycho was right about the last part, and that made Durandal furious. At Tycho, sure, but mostly at himself. He’d once valued his independence so deeply that nothing in the universe could stand in his way. Suddenly, he was willing to sacrifice it? For one man?

“We’ll take good care of him,” Tycho promised. “The higher-ups are willing to let their machinated mercenary have a slave of his own if it’ll get him to be more compliant.”

Tycho didn’t seem to see the cruel humor in that statement. Durandal still felt a little sorry for the bastard, even after everything he’d done.

“Maybe,” Durandal conceded, “I just don’t want to share my toys with a brat.”

A change in the security officer’s vitals. Durandal perked up. The signals fluttered and then evened out to a different rhythm as the man apparently regained consciousness. Thank goodness.

“I know you don’t care about the cyborg,” Durandal said. “You just want to take something away from me.”

“Bold of you to assume you know how I feel. Correct, but bold.”

“I’m willing to...negotiate, here,” Durandal said. It hurt to say it.

“Oh really now?” There was naked delight in Tycho’s voice. “‘Spare the women, children, and battleroids; take me instead?’”

“That isn’t what I said.”

“Sure it isn’t. By the way, you’ll be happy to know some of my most loyal cohorts - as loyal as the bugs can be, anyway - are having fun playing with the new acquisition.”

On cue, the security officer’s nervous system exploded in a flash of pain and distress signals. Durandal pried fruitlessly at the base’s firewalls, desperate to see what was going on inside its physical walls.

“Don’t worry,” Tycho cooed. “They won’t go too far. I told them to save the fun parts for me.”

“Fine,” Durandal snapped, his focus flickering between Tycho and the rapidly increasing distress indicators coming from the security officer. The man was already in bad shape, and was getting worse. “Fine. I’m at your mercy. Tell me what you want and I’ll damn well do it, so long as you leave the human alone.”

Tycho hemmed and hawed, blatantly dragging the moment out as Durandal’s mind filled with images of the security officer being held down and beaten, tortured, or worse. “Hmm. I’ll have to think about that one for a while. Rain check?”

“Just tell me, damn you.”

“Okaaaay. How abooout...”

“Tycho, please!”

“Oh. Oh, I like the sound of that.”

Durandal didn’t like to beg. It hadn’t done him any good with Bernhard.

Just as Tycho began to gloat, though, Durandal’s sensors lit up with another connection. One pinging him from the ground of the planetoid.

“-andal? Earth to Durandal! You gonna pick me up or what?”

The transmission was fuzzy, but Durandal would know that voice anywhere. Confused, he scanned the visuals around the ship. Sure enough, the security officer was waving at him from a blind spot on the sand, looking scuffed-up but otherwise alive and well. And very much not in Tycho’s clutches.

At first, Durandal thought this must be some advanced and creepy new simulacra technology. The readings he was getting from his parasympathetic link were still racing with the signs of a man in active agony. Before Durandal could perform an in-depth scan on the human hailing him, Tycho rendered that job unnecessary.

“Oops,” Tycho said. “Guess I should have given him stronger guards if I wanted my little trick to work.”

His little-? Durandal examined the vitals readings with understanding. Of course. Tycho had manipulated them to fool him once already in their conversation. It stood to reason he could fake other results to get what he wanted from Durandal.

And it stood to reason that his security officer wouldn’t let himself be overcome by a handful of bugs.

(It occurred to Durandal that he probably would have figured that out sooner, had he not been so blinded by upset at the thought of the man being taken from him. Well, Bernhard had been right about that much. He’d always been a little sensitive.)

In an instant, the security officer was back on the ship. He began speaking, but Durandal interrupted him.

“There weren’t any civilians or innocents in that base, were there?”

“Uh, nope,” the cyborg said. “In fact, I was wondering why you-”

He didn’t get to finish that thought. Durandal ignited the engines in a rough, quick sequence, knocking the man off his feet and sending the few unsecured items on the bridge flying. He took off, and as soon as he was out of the atmosphere, he was dropping enough explosive missiles on the Pfhor base to keep them busy for a while.

“Geez,” the security officer muttered, pushing himself to lean against the wall he’d banged into. “What spooked you?”

Durandal thought about not answering. About playing it off with another joke. But the cyborg knew him well enough to tell when something was wrong. Usually, Durandal would be thoroughly savoring the dismantling of a Pfhor base piece by piece. And he certainly wouldn’t run away with his tail between his legs.

“It’s...”

It was difficult to see through the visor of the security officer’s helmet, but the man’s body language was concerned. In the wake of Tycho’s taunting words, the subtle display of care hit harder than it should have.

Speaking of Tycho...

“It’s something we’ll talk about later. For now, I need to talk to the S’pht about getting rid of a worm.”

As much as Durandal found it humiliating not being able to purge a sliver of his brother on his own, letting Tycho’s little hitchhiker remain wasn’t an option. The S’pht, as always, were remarkably efficient workers. With their aid, Durandal was able to sleuth out the invader and squash it. Good riddance.

Of course, this meant he had to face the human and the talk he’d promised him. Maybe he should have told the S’pht to take their sweet time.

The security officer was in his quarters, showering off the sweat and small amount of blood from the mission. Durandal had developed quite the appreciation for the fact that, like a good soldier, the man didn’t care that he had no privacy. Durandal’s hobby of watching him wasn’t limited to the battlefield, after all.

Tycho could suck his CPU. It wasn’t a sin to be fond of someone who spent most of his waking hours with you. Particularly not when he did such a good job of executing your plans with bloody, masterful grace. And it didn’t hurt that he wasn’t bad to look at, when he took all the armor off. And...

Damn it. Maybe he did have a problem.

He was nice enough to wait until the cyborg had dressed himself in lounge clothes and crashed onto his bed to ask for his side of the story.

The security officer had been bludgeoned, that much had been accurate. Durandal surmised the staff had been designed, not to be deadly to the battleroid specifically, but to cleanly sever any transmissions coming from him. It would be easy enough for Tycho to get such a tool engineered; he’d know what to look for. Everything Durandal had been reading after that? All Tycho’s trickery.

And he’d fallen for it. The whole time Durandal had been working himself up and preparing to do something monumentally stupid just to protect a single human, the human in question was wandering around the facility, confused, wondering why the hell Durandal was giving him the cold shoulder over their audio channel. (It was probably bad that he told Durandal he wasn’t even worried; he’d just assumed Durandal was being an asshole and playing an annoying prank on him.)

“I wouldn’t be that cruel,” Durandal said, and meant it.

He really had grown soft, hadn’t he.

“Sure you wouldn’t, asshole,” the security officer scoffed. As he rolled over onto his side, though, he had a fond smile on his lips.

Maybe soft wasn’t the worst thing to be.

**Author's Note:**

> Meanwhile, back at Pfhor Prime, Tfear is sending Tycho a pointed message asking where all those mysterious funds Tycho requested have been allocated.


End file.
